Snow..... Rain..... Sunshine

Yes, we had snow!  Not at home but at the office while I was at work. There was a few particularly mild days and then a sharp turn.  The Southern areas, especially Tasmania and the South of Victoria had violent winds causing terrible damage.  With it came freezing temperatures.  Last Friday only reached 5 degrees where I work and on the way I could see the rain turning to sleet.  By the afternoon it was snowing in bursts.  It melted on impact among the rain sodden streets but higher areas of the state had everything covered in a sprinkling of snow.  The news on TV showed scenes more familiar to us on England than here at home.  It was a bitterly cold night with forecasts predicting -2 degrees.  It felt like it!

This week we have woken to crisp blue skies and a good frost.  This is just the sort of Winter day I love.  Mick can't wait to get outside and we decided last weekend we would let the chickens free range for the first time since we got them.  It didn't take much prompting as they had a large area at the place we got them from.  Wilbur immediately starting calling his girls to show them some morsel he had scratched up.  The girls have been given names now.   One of them has blue leg bands (Betty), one has red leg bands (Rosalie) and the third doesn't have leg bands so she is "plain legged" and called Prunella. Our boating readers will likely know where we got that name.  After our first egg last week it took almost a week for another to arrive.  One of the girls has much more red in her comb so I'm guessing she is the layer.

At last we feel like we have a routine and have settled down a bit.  I enjoy living in this house.  Mick has made some improvements on the little garden shed so we have plenty of shelving now for storing tools, garden equipment and chicken stuff.

It's lovely to be baking our own bread again and to be able to pick up a bulk bargain and have somewhere to store it.  My mum and her partner bought a huge box of rather ripe bananas for $5 and I came home that day with 27 bananas!  I used to bake banana cake a lot when we bought our first house and were on a very tight budget.  Mick ate like a horse when he was younger and would go through 2 banana cakes each week for his morning tea, although I later discovered they were being shared with his workmate.  My recipe came from my high school cookbook which mum had in her cupboard.  So now it has been resurrected.  I've made 3 banana cakes in the last month and there is bananas chopped and frozen into parcels for one cake each in the freezer.  I've passed on bananas to friends and neighbours too.

We really enjoy chatting with our UK friends on FaceTime and Skype.  We had a great chat with Andy and Jean on nb Josephine tonight, even saying hello to Missy the cat.  We miss you guys and it was so nice to see your smiling faces.